[HotHotHeat]

Couple things. Not going to read through this entire thread, but I'm guessing most people are disagreeing with the article after the first few that I did read.

I worked for the city this year as well, third year with them. I was at this orientation. The motivational speaker was a regurgitative tool. He had no charisma, and talked as if we were nine year old special needs kids.

The 'training' we got wasn't training at all. It was a generic exercise that was terribly planned and even more terribly executed.

The problem with the City of Calgary Parks Division is as follows. No (expletive) accountability. The labourers don't work very hard because they are not given any responsibility (for example.... We want you to have x number of parks finished by the end of today). This doesn't happen because the supervisors of these labourers aren't given any schedule to keep pace to by the district manager (I should mention, I'm changing the names of these positions, but the chain of command is correct). The district manager doesn't do this because (in my experience) they are just terrible managers. Bad at managing people, time, projects, resources, etc.

Like I said, this is my third year working with them, and each year I've had a different district manager. They're all so freaking incompetent it's sickening.

The most frustrating part about working for the city is the response you get from the supervisors when you voice displeasure or desire to change something. Usually it's along the lines of "The more you care about this job, the more frustrated you'll get. The best thing to do is just not care about things very much and go through the motions."

I half expect that above quote to be unbelievable for most people, but I can assure you it's happened to me on more than one occasion from different people.

The City of Calgary is a giant cluster**** of taxpayer resources, and it's getting worse by the year. The culture of laziness, lack of accountability, and piss poor management is incredibly frustrating to observe on a day to day basis.

I completely side with Kacie in her freelance piece. Good on her for using her available channel to voice her thoughts. More city employees need to speak out on the wasteful spending that goes on. It's not as bad as you think it is, it's worse.